Sunday, September 22, 2019

Luna Park 2019



I have to say..... I would feel a lot better about.... well everything - if the stuff I rolled up to wasn't completely caved out. It's been happening all year. I literally can't figure out where people are spending money.

I have never seen Luna Park the way it was today. Usually businesses sponsor chalk artists and there was almost none of that this year. It was a quarter of the size and PC culture (I think) is making everything almost joyless. I don't think there were any professional artists there this year at all. Almost none at Palo Alto either.

If it were just this event, I'd think that maybe people just didn't want this content anymore. But it's been going on all year with every type of event.



































3 comments:

  1. I'm sure somewhere along the way I mentioned a model that might help ...

    Consider art and culture with a critical inversion: rather than the artist speaking to the public with the artist's perspective, where the public reacts to the art and the artist's critique, the artist is now waiting for important artistic and cultural messages to be presented so that they may be reflected as conveyed messages without critique.

    Go to the movies, and what do you really see?

    The critical inversion of know-nothing actors telling show runners, producers, and even writers the kinds of things they should be doing, and above all, don't offend anyone because Hollyweird's latest casting couch call can only summon up so much new talent in the aftermath of psychopathic freaks running free.

    So why is it a surprise when your local artists are waiting on that Special Samizdat Delivery of Fresh New Ideas Approved For Public Consumption that never arrives?

    Pirandello, call your office. Beckett, go see where Godot wound up. Turgenev, lighten up, you'll offend the Americans with your Russian pathos, it's a "global market of ideas", didn't you know.

    And everyone else, please proceed to the Grand Egress!

    When art and culture can talk back, then you can have this thing where people question what these things around them mean, and the cycle of art and culture continues ...

    But now? Is it pretty? Does it mean anything?

    How the fuck does anyone know?

    What the fuck is this even for?

    So yeah, I get it.

    Your art scene is like going to a summer camp to watch artists learn how to paint like Thomas Kincade ...

    Thirty years ago? That girl blowing on that flower would be blowing out Russian cluster bombs that are landing on poppy fields, and nearly nobody would have understood the implied reference that those fields are in The Stan, but there would have been plenty of people who would have been able to Get It.

    Even ten years ago? The "orange revolutions" in the background?

    Someone would have noticed. There would be people who would Get It.

    But now, many artists are too afraid of everything to dare to do that stuff.

    "... no revolution, maybe someone somewhere else ..."

    "HELP MAKE AWESOME HAPPEN ..."

    ... by fleeing this place fast before it gets you too!

    The pink triangle fast-forward thing was the big hint as to the real purpose of the message, in case you weren't reading that very critically.

    You still have some artists who unconsciously speak the truth, so there's perhaps a level of hope left, not that they may be able to reverse the tide ...

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  2. "The pink triangle fast-forward thing was the big hint as to the real purpose of the message, in case you weren't reading that very critically."


    I didn't even post the ones with all the climate nannying. It's like there is no original thought anywhere and it's super depressing.

    Hey - when I was growing up there were a bunch of sci-fi movies that envisioned us all wearing unitards with our heads shaved. Do you remember any of those? Because it's sort of like what this period of time feels like. Completely homogenize. No individuality at all.

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  3. It's Cap of T Refugee's movie recommendation time!

    You want unitard shaved head dystopia in the Bay Area, you've got it: THX 1138.

    Francis Ford Coppola, Robert Duvall, Donald Pleasance, Don Pedro Colley ... it even has futuristic California Highway Patrol robots and was shot on the construction site of BART!

    But if you want how it really turned out today, you have to watch the 1998 NBC TV movie adaptation of "Brave New World".

    Leonard Nimoy is super-believable and super-groovy as World Controller Mustapha Mond, and the actress who plays Lenina Crowne looks every bit the part.

    This time the dystopian transit involves Los Angeles instead of the Bay Area -- Pershing Square never looked so out of place.

    But the most shocking dystopian movie?

    It's the one going on in reality in both of those places!

    Won't be long now until going to the Los Angeles County Courthouse will be just like the good old days of the Black Assizes ...

    Back then you needed to avoid jury duty out of a need for survival.

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